Motortherapy

“Always carry a bar of soap!” his father advises, as Allstair sets off to drive from Nairobi halfway across Africa in a secondhand Austin in the 1950s. “It wasn’t clear to me how you could fix a leak in the gas tank with soap,” Allstair reports, “but I never doubted that sort of instruction coming from him.” So begins the first tale in this sequel to Bill Schermbrucker’s well-received collection Chameleon and Other Stories.